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Why the Calorie Is Broken (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters. Further, one of the most basic concepts for how we evaluate food — the calorie — is incredibly imprecise. "Wilbur Atwater, a Department of Agriculture scientist, began by measuring the calories contained in more than 4,000 foods. Then he fed those foods to volunteers and collected their faeces, which he incinerated in a bomb calorimeter. After subtracting the energy measured in the faeces from that in the food, he arrived at the Atwater values, numbers that represent the available energy in each gram of protein, carbohydrate and fat. These century-old figures remain the basis for today's standards."
In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
... to
"One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods." ...than it is to eat when you are hungry and stop when you aren't, while avoiding shit foods.
FTA "Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends."
Is it possible that the Calorie is just fine and maybe using some cheap piece of electronics strapped to your wrist is just a really piss poor way to track the energy expended?
improved digestion etc... give until it stops hurting?
Could this mean that the empty calorie foods might might be full again?
It's amazing how people can delude themselves into thinking they are special snowflakes; somehow, the laws of thermodynamics don't apply just to them.
A piece of food may yield X calories when incinerated, whether or not YOU utilize them and how effectively you utilize them is another story.
This has always been true, but now people are rules-lawyering science to explain why their kids are fatties.
OMG!!!! SOMETHING IN MEDICINE IS INACCURATE!!!!
A question about this 'study': Did they test people with an average diet, or people with a healthy diet? Because, we know lots of things change with diets and the average diet isn't exactly healthy.
I don't see how any of that stuff makes the calorie "broken". Sure, "Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars." etc etc. Gasoline has 30MJ/L of energy, and the fact that cars have different fuel efficiencies doesn't mean that isn't useful data, or that the joule is "broken" either.
Is it really news to anybody that you need to take account of more than just pure calorie intake when monitoring your diet?
Oh no... it's the future.
"Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters."
assumptions underlying above statements are flawed.
each body is a highly complex system and varies from one to another. food usually consist in highly complex molecules. to simplify all that to give simple numbers that " everybody should understand" is bound to fail. and research into such complex systems are bound bound to be "conflicting".
path of simplification here is wrong.
"Then there are issues with serving sizes"
Someone doesn't understand calories.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If we're talking about obesity, then it's still a case of you only get fat if you eat too much. And here (for those who haven't already clicked Reply and are starting an argument) "too much" means more than your body needs to function, for however much or little exercise you take.
If your weight is increasing and you don't want it to: either exercise more to burn off the excess, or eat less. That is independent of whatever unit of energy you use - or the accuracy of the food labeling.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A "calorie" is a depreciated unit of measurement for energy. You don't eat calories, you eat food, and this food is digested and burned (producing CO2) which releases energy. When the amount of food you eat surpasses your need it is "stored" in the form of fat inducing your overweight. The reasoning of measuring energy is that an excess of food with high energy (sugars, fats) release will induce overweight because the way the body accumulates its carbohydrates in the form of fat, but it is a very complex process. Anyway energy is not a thing and does not have mass, therefore there is no sense in thinking that "x calories equals y grams of mass", at least not directly.
In fact physicists, not physicians, and engineers measure energy in Joule units, which should be used for anything energy related, and some countries -New Zealand, I guess- post the nutrition facts in J/g as it should be.
Try it, works wonders!
Having something on the packet that says so much of this has a certain amount of energy does help people compare foods and make healthier choices.
In food, those would be Calories (also known as kilocalories), not calories.
Counting calories, limiting yourself to 1,000-1,200 a day, and exercising for 1 hour rigorously without interruption is the one method of weight loss guaranteed to work. The problem is that people either consume more calories or fail to perform exercise that is truly rigorous (elevates the heart rate for a sustained period of an hour). Furthermore, counting calories from feces is horribly inaccurate, that completely fails to take into account how well the body processed the content into liquid which could have easily been sweated out, that's why calories are properly determined with burning of the food in a controlled laboratory, not the human body.
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Regardless of metabolism, exercise, how well you digest food, etc, the following always holds true (maybe not precisely true to minute decimal places, but true)
Take all the calories you eat, subtract out the calories you lose, exude, emit, excrete or otherwise eliminate.
If the result is more than the number of calories your body needs to run, you'll gain weight.
For me, I know the magic number is around 2400 calories per day. I don't stress that it may be 2350 or 2450, the round number works well.
It's fascinating how angry some people get by this post. Might be because it takes ALL the science out of fat-shaming?
It's not as simple the oversimplification most people hold as a bible: energy in - energy out = weight gain
As said; the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Believing everyone has the same digestive system is insane.
Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.
BMI is pretty useless for many people. Taking myself for example. I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs with body fat % somewhere in the low teens. I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight. If I were to cut to competition weight I would be 150-160 and I competed in college at 150 many years ago. Anything lower than that and I'd be well into unhealthy - certainly nothing sustainable. But according to BMI calculators I would have to get down to around 130lbs to be considered underweight. Last time I weighed that much I was cutting weight as a junior in high school and was under 6% body fat. You'd have to put me in a concentration camp or give me cancer to get me that low again. BMI calculators put me now at borderline overweight at my current weight and that description doesn't make sense. My waist size is the same as it has been since college and while I could shed about 5-10% of my body mass without ill effect that's hardly overweight. I'm not delusional about my weight - I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do. Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large swath of the population. It does have some utility but it can be pretty misleading too.
Dump the crap food, eat good stuff with enough "fiber" and eat less overall w/more fiber to lose weight.
If he had done that research today he would have died in the swat raid looking for his bomb.
But its ok, it would be his own fault for making them suspicious enough to put him on the no fly list for his seditious publication about bombs.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
All this should be very familiar by now to anyone who is interested in nutrition. Gary Taubes, in particular, has explained the facts fully and clearly in his books, starting with "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (published, for some strange reason, under the title "The Diet Delusion" in the UK).
It should be obvious that the total chemical energy in a substance is by no means the same as the energy that the human digestive system extracts from it. Otherwise we could consume, and thrive on, hydrocarbons such as coal and oil. Incidentally, there is strong evidence that the potential calories in alcohol are not used by the normal human body for energy. (See Tony Edwards' book "The Good News About Booze" for many convincing citations). The confusing exceptions are beer and sweetened drinks, in which the energy is provided by carbohydrates not alcohol. If we did use alcohol for energy, I would certainly not have lost weight in the past year while eating a good balanced diet and drinking several bottles of wine a week. (Dry wine, of course).
Another ancient metric that is completely discredited is the Body Mass Index (BMI). Adolphe Quetelet proposed the standard formula "weight(kg)/height(m)^2" as a stopgap approximation in 1830! It is a marvellous example of how people will accept a standard, once it is exists, without ever asking how valid or accurate it is. A single glance should be enough to recognize that, as human beings are three-dimensional and not two-dimensional, there is something seriously wrong with Quetelet's BMI. He himself seems to have understood that an exponent of more like 2.5 would be more appropriate. Yet everyone, from doctors to actuaries, has simply gone on using it ever since. See https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/... for a better approximation, with a brief explanation and an "improved BMI calculator".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Following the diet at the letter was meaning weigh as much I could all the food I was eating and estimate when I couldn't, say wen I was eating outside, and having one and only one meal per week where I eated a bit more, like pizza or sushi, but without overeating.
Of course some foods were banned, like carbonated dink with sugar or industrial snacks. The doctor said to me that if I wanted to eat say some chocolate, having to eat less was way better to eat the high quality one.
When last week I meet him for the control visit, he complimented me with the result and gave me the maintenance diet, that was similar to the one I was following for loss weight but with some more daily food to eat.
I think that self made diets or read on newspapers aren't going to work. Ask an expert..
Remember the government's "four food groups" with X servings of 4 groups (meats, dairy, bread, fruits and vegetables)? (http://www.rootedcook.com/visuals/foodguides/ - 1956-1992) It worked (it was even used on game shows) because people could understand and remember four things and whole numbers without units.
Today's government food pyramid? It's 6 different items measured in a mix of "cups" and "ounces" (http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/05/82105-004-3C485EB5.jpg) - not exactly how food is packaged and remembering 6 different figures with units is beyond what people can easily recollect.
If you want the masses to "get" any nutritional advise, I can't see how blowing up a common denominator like the calorie would help.
With the way calories are counted... what's the official calorie value of a box of tissues?
'cause cellulose burns pretty well, but contributes a flat 0 to human nutrition.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This sort of story smacks of "Nutritionism" as explained in Michael Pollan's book 'In Defense Of Food'. Generally people do not need to know how many calories, carbs, nutrients, vitamins, etc. are in a piece of food unless you are a nutritionist, and most people aren't. How to eat healthy comes down to one simple rule:
Eat food(1) mostly plants(2) not too much(3).
(1) Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food. Nothing overly processed. Food should spoil. If what you eat will not spoil you should not eat it. Things that are not food, but edible food-type substances: refined sugar (includes soda, twinkies, etc), refined flour (white bread, etc), refined oils of all kinds (peanut oil, sunflower oil, and *gasp* olive oil).
(2) Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.
(3) Don't eat too much of one thing. Don't overeat.
If you do this, you don't need to count calories or take vitamins or worry about your riboflavin intake. Just eat and be healthy.
-Matt
Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.
Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get a stable weight by calorie counting. They will do classical bang-bang (on/off) control and constantly switch between eating a few hundred calories less than needed and eating a few hundred calories more than needed. That way calorie counting does not have to be very exact and still works but also causes stress. If calorie intake and use could be monitored more precisely people would not need to switch between two different states, but instead tiny adjustments of meal size would also work.
Jan
Google "The Hacker's Diet." In it, John Walker explains the basics of how it's all about just doing the math every day. I lost 33 lbs last year with a slightly modified version of this method. When I tell people I lost weight, the first words, almost invariably, are, "What's your secret?"
When I say "I counted calories every day" they are underwhelmed. The only other "secret" is that you have to be willing to be -a little- hungry, but not starving.
Web edition: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd...
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Not as a fraction of the population.
Yes even as a fraction of the population. I'm not saying BMI is without utility or that it doesn't apply to many people but it's misleading for probably somewhere north of 10% of the population. That's a significant amount for such a widely used tool.
You're a fairly extreme case. You're a wrestler and clearly do a lot of excersise etc. And you come out mostly OK.
I'm really not a particularly extreme case and there is plenty of data to support that. I'm probably more active than average but I assure you I don't work out enough to be considered an extreme case physically. I'm probably something like 70-90ith percentile. Somewhere between 1 and 2 standard deviations on the good side if you presume a bell curve. My point is that there are a non-trivial number of people like me - enough that BMI by itself is frequently misleading if you don't understand what it measures and where it isn't useful.
Instead of
One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
1) Eat food - food does not list ingredients, but often is listed as an ingredient. A potato is food, A box of scallop potatoes is not. If what you are eating is required to have labels to inform you of what is really in it, then it isn't food. (Note: this applies mainly to packaged food products. Obviously, there are foods that have labels, because they may be packed in water, etc.)
2) Don't change calories - Calories simply measure the maximum amount of energy that may be utilized. People have different metabolisms so that one person may be more efficient at utilizing those calories than somebody else, but that doesn't mean we should change the measure. Different automobiles are more or less efficient at utilizing gasoline, but that doesn't mean we should change how gasoline is labeled.
3) Calories aren't nutrition - Calories are about energy, not nutrition. 100 calorie apple and a 100 calories of sugar both provide the same amount of available energy, but the sugar has zero nutritional value. However, since calories do impact weight as in calories consumed less calories burned will either add to or subtract from one's weight, they can't be ignored. On the otherhand, they shouldn't be obsessed over, particularly since metabolism has a major impact on weight.
4) CICO - Calories In, Calories Out - assuming one is getting adequate nutrition, if the concern is weight, then regardless of ones metabolism, if you are gaining weight more weight than you want, you either a) need to reduce calories or b) burn more calories. Likewise, if you are losing more weight than desired, you need to a) increase calories or b) burn less of them. It doesn't take some database tailored to your specific body or specific flora in your gut. Those may explain why one person loses or gains more than another, but it doesn't alter CICO.
TL;DR - We don't need a national database of each person's metabolic profile or gut flora. We simply need to eat nutritious food and have more active lifestyles.
People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population.
Not to the point of statistical insignificance. Furthermore a tool that purports to measure what constitutes healthy body composition should at a minimum be able to work for people who actually DO have a healthy body composition. Telling someone they are "overweight" when actually what happened is they found the squat rack means that it isn't a very good tool. It can't tell the difference between healthy amounts of muscle and unhealthy amounts of fat. You don't even have to go to extremes (I'm certainly not one) to find cases where BMI falls apart as a useful measure.
BMI has some utility but it's over used and misapplied quite a lot.
He's collecting people's FACES? What a monster! Oh, theres just a superflous A in feces. How do you pronounce faeces, is it like fah-eh-ceez?
Can someone explain why the article cites Wilbur Atwater as a Department of Agriculture scientist? I think he did his research as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. http://www.britannica.com/biog... Maybe he had funding from the Department of Agriculture? Maybe the author is trying to be dismissive of the scientific results by implying that it was serving an agenda? It was primitive work in the late 1800s, but it did set the foundation for a lot of more precise work on human metabolism. No one is questioning the main conclusions of Atwater that human metabolism obeys the law of conservation of energy, and that it is important (and difficult) to quantify energy intake.
One thing I can see becoming very popular in the next couple decades is Gut Flora Transplantation.
The flora of your gut are heavily responsible for a lot of what goes on in your body.
To put it in to perspective, they should be considered a 3rd facet of human biology, 1 being the mitochondria, 2 being our human genome, and 3 being the gut flora we inherit from parents.
Kids that don't inherit those bacteria tend to have all kinds of horrible illness around the puberty ages onwards. C-sections have been a large one to blame for that, with a large correlation and very good evidence linking it as a causation.
Equally, they have also found out a massive link to how "fast" your metabolism works, and how fat you are likely to get.
They define how gassy you get, how much wind you get. They can even influence acidity if some acid-loving ones get a foothold, which can lead to autoimmune down the line. (don't drink carbonated drinks kids! They are awful for you!)
There are even links to mood and depression especially.
The fact that there has been a bunch of people that have had gut flora transplants and suddenly either became much thinner that they usually were, or fatter, was pretty out of the blue. They never thought things like that would have happened.
The people that gave said transplants were thin and fat, respectively.
It needs a lot more research. Finally it is being taken seriously after years of pushing it under pseudoscience nonsense by the larger scientific community.
The laws of thermodynamics still do apply. Person a average body temperature is 97.6F vs a person whose average body temperature is 99F There body is converting the energy of food to body heat, and people have different averages.
Also if you eat 2,000 calories a day. and due to your body you poop out 300 calories while someone else will poop out 400 calories.
The problem with most diets today it isn't based on good science, where there is a full study, but take a small sample of people and just use what seemed to work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just exactly as you say, counting calories worked for me when I wanted to lose weight, I lost 35 pounds when I planned my intake and stuck to it. As you say, it's not like you have to hit the right numbers on day one, you can chart your weight and I could have adjusted my intake up and down through experimentation to manipulate my weight if I wanted to. My ultimate downfall is that I did not want to keep the diet up. The planning was a chore and quite frankly I enjoy eating the things that got me so overweight in the first place.
So in my case, the ability to measure my caloric intake with more precision would have made little difference I think
Maybe some kind of bio/blood monitor that could tell me that I had earned the right to eat something might help, but I'd probably switch it off if someone put a plate fo french fries in front of me
Nullius in verba
The definition of a calorie as a unit of energy is fine.
The estimate of calories absorbed from different foods measured by Atwater is not fine. If a candy bar indicates 400 calories, you may actually get 700 calories or 200 calories or some other amount out of it depending on your particular ability to absorb nutrients. Different people, different absorption rates. Hell, people's absorption rates may change over the course of a day, week, month, year, lifetime.
Energy In - Energy Out = Energy Stored + Energy Expended
By burning all our foods in calorimeters we can measure Energy In. By burning all our poo in calorimeters we can get Energy Out. The problem is that the Atwater measurements are for a different person and it is assumed that the Energy In - Energy Out bit is the same for you as for them for a given food. Unless everyone wants to get in the habit of burning samples of their food and poo in calorimeters to calibrate their systems, getting accurate estimates of the Energy In - Energy Out bit will be very difficult.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.
Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get a stable weight by calorie counting. They will do classical bang-bang (on/off) control and constantly switch between eating a few hundred calories less than needed and eating a few hundred calories more than needed. That way calorie counting does not have to be very exact and still works but also causes stress. If calorie intake and use could be monitored more precisely people would not need to switch between two different states, but instead tiny adjustments of meal size would also work.
You bring up a very important concept here, that calories in / calories out is just the general, first layer and there is nuance that goes deeper into what your body does with those calories from various sources. On a day in day out basis the things that have to be considered, in order of importance are these:
1- Calories in / Calories out - How many calories you consume, and this is where most people stop in terms of comparing what they put in their mouth to what weight they are able to lose from exercise (whether that weight loss is water weight, metabolized stored body fat or broken down muscle tissue.) To lose stored body fat one has to have enough calories to maintain their body, and musculature yet burn enough calories that a percentage of their energy expenditure comes from stored body fat without causing muscle wasting. This is why number 2 is important because your body has to be in the right condition to be able to free up stored fatty acids from stored body fat and this only happens under certain conditions.
2- Diet Macronutrient Balance - as a general rule, if you are not a serious weight lifter, eating the typical american diet means you are consuming something like 60% of your calories from various types of carbohydrates. If you are extremely active this generally does not affect your body fat, if you are performing resistance exercise, recovering from muscle damage (and building more muscle) requires the consumption of an amount of protein and carbohydrate, both of which stimulate the release of insulin, both to lower blood sugar and to stimulate protein synthesis which is the process from which new muscle tissue is built. That is fine and good but it is so easy to consume too much, and if you are not involved in weight training, those carbohydrates still stimulate insulin release and if you consume too much (in terms of total calories) or too many carbohydrates as a too large percentage of total daily calories, you will end up in a situation where no matter how hard you exercise the carbs you consume will be used to refuel your muscle and liver glycogen stores and the rest will get stored as body fat. You will not be able to burn stored body fat as energy because your body is conditioned to derive energy from carbohydrates and the exercise just acts to deplete your glycogen and any blood sugar present. This results in low energy, low blood sugars and cortisol release which further reduces your ability to burn body fat and at this point the blood sugar debt starts your body breaking down muscle protein to turn into blood sugar to cover the blood sugar debt from exercise.. yes it is true that if you work out too hard and are too dependent on carbohydrates for energy... yes you will lose weight but it will come from muscle tissue and not body fat. The general rule is that if your insulin levels are too high and you are not actively building muscle, any energy deficit can only be covered from dietary carbohydrates or from breaking down muscle protein into glucose th
For those of you who believe that weight is a simple matter of calories in, calories out - and if you just ate less and exercise more all the fatsos out there would be thin, consider this:
-There is an epidemic of fat babies - shall we tell them to get out of that crib and take a jog?
-There is an epidemic of fat zoo animals and lab animals. Are they all bing-watching Netflix while eating McDonald's?
-Type 1 diabetes was once called 'the wasting disease' because a lack of insulin prevented the body from storing fat. These days, a dirty little secret of some type 1 diabetics is that they risk their health and not inject the insulin they need as a mean to lose weight effortlessly.
-Much of 'nutrition science' is based on flimsy research that can be cherry-picked to prove whatever the researchers want it to prove.
-In a 'publish or perish' science world, research that supports the common thinking gets published over the research that refutes the common thinking.
-Obesity is looked upon as a moral failure and not a physical symptom that can be caused by many different reasons. Just one example: many drugs can cause rapid weight gain.
-Exercise might be good for you - but it doesn't make you thin.
Here's a few links to back this up:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/
http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=56339
I've been researching this topic for a decade - I've got plenty more where this came from.
I have personally used calories to predict my weight loss and I know others who have done so as well. Maybe the measurement of calories is not perfect but it is *very good* and generally the best way to manage your weight.
I knew it! Calories are a shit measurement.
...we have changed to kiloJoule some 25 years ago and now we can compare gasoline, electricity and food... how long tie can I have this LED lit on one BigMac and a Coca Cola.
COOOL!!!
...a truly shit job!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Because some fat bastard sat on it?
Of course it's not their fault. Metabolism or something.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just look at those old concentration camp pics and notice: no fat prisoners! The starvation (plus some work exercise) diet DOES work. I'm sure Elie Wiesel can confirm this.
Lacking certain probiotics will make some food indigestable to you.
Lacking a lot of probiotics will make a lot of food indigestible to you.
Lacking certain probiotics will lead to bad food reactions.
Having certain probiotics will lead to gaining weight as you will be more efficient at extracting calories from food.
While you usually lose a lot of your intestinal bacteria when you take antibiotics, you can also lose them from diseases which don't make you sick but which do kill off your intestinal bacteria.
While some people push taking pro-biotics every day (even selling them in bottles of 30 pills), in my life, I've found taking a single pill is enough to jumpstart my system when I lose it.
Whole foods used to sell 3 varieties of pills- each with a different selection of healthy gut bacteria. One was yellow and one was purple. I can't recall the color of the third type. My feeling was that a complex gut was better than a monoculture gut (no science to back that up tho).
Three times in my life- I've had my gut bacteria killed off by an illness. Two of those times, it only effected my intestinal flora. The other, I was also sick physically. In each case, taking a single pill of each type and some yogart fixed things up quickly.
I have a friend who has celiac disease and her reaction was bad tho. She had strong distress after taking pro-biotics.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I weep for the days when this thread would have been laced with Natalie Portman comments.
Humans don't digest anything (except complex carbohydrates, via saliva in the mouth). Gut bacteria digest food. What is available for the host human to absorb after the bacteria are done changes significantly -- not by some little correction factor, by up to an order of magnitude -- depending on a number of factors such as food particle size, prevalence of cell walls and connective tissue, the exact ratio and distribution of gut bacteria species, and so forth, for a given "energy content" of food. (A human will typically absorb as much chemical energy from a 4-oz. medium-well hamburger patty as from a 16-oz. rare steak, and an much from a 2-oz. piece of cake as from a 6-oz hunk of black bread.)
What the human body then does with that chemical energy depends on a number of genetic, environmental, and experiential factors. Having lost a significant amount of weight lowers energy demand, permanently, by up to 30%. Food availability to the mother during gestation affects the metabolic efficiency of the offspring. Hormones and hormone analogs in _microgram_ quantities effect the efficiency and completeness of energy absorption by the gut and whether abdominal fat stores the glucose. (Subcutaneous fat responds to glucose levels, not hormone levels.) Oddly, there is a strong correlation between maternal soy consumption during pregnancy and non-obese offspring: but then soy is an estrogen mimic. Most plastics also shed endocrine mimics.
The "fuel" model of food is overly simplistic. The conflation of extreme overweight and obesity is overly simplistic (yes, obese people can diet and exercise to normal weight -- 5% of the time; the other 95%, other mechanisms keep the fat from turning into energy). The worldwide obesity crisis cannot be solved by diet, exercise, and willpower, because it is not caused by overeating, lack of exercise, and self-indulgence. _Overweight_ can be so addressed; obesity cannot.
Apparently the calorie doesn't fit well with Coke Cola's new branding and market positioning, and as such will need to be re-defined to shine a better light on their products.
It's called the cloaca by Wim Delvoye
So the article does have some valid points that differences in digestion efficiency, individual calorie expenditure or inaccuracies in listed nutrients, etc. could be sources of inaccuracy when planning your diet. However, what the average overweight person will take away from this is: Counting calories is useless, I might as well just give up.
Having been raised by a very obese mother, I know this attitude all too well. I too, was overweight and desired to keep my weight down and also believed that calorie restriction would mess up your metabolism and eventually make you even fatter.
Eventually, I challenged myself to stop eating sugar since I have a family history of diabetes, and luckily found that I was able to break through my previous sticking point. This inspired me to try to add a little more rigor into my routine, which eventually paid off big time. Now I'm lean and muscular and go to the gym regularly. I find that calorie counting with a food scale is VERY effective.
So I tend to find the fatalistic attitude people have regarding weight loss to be very destructive, not only to themselves and others.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
When the number of calories you excrete depends on the number of calories you take in, there is no magic number.
I have been told "you are allowed to get seconds", when people saw how much I put on my plate (those were not small plates). What they didn't see was that once I had eaten that, I would go back and put just as much on my plate as I did the first time.
Though the third time, I would put less on my table. Not because of the number of calories, but because my stomach has a limited size.
That was back when I had a job where I paid the same amount no matter how much I ate. Nowadays, I cook myself, and cut a "serves four" recipe in half (so I eat for two). Except when I make pancakes, I don't cut it in half. But then I do need to wait half an hour to have room in my stomach for the last two pancakes.
My body simply takes the energy it needs, and the rest ends up in the toilet.
First of all, the unit referred to in regards to food is mislabeled. The amounts given are in kilocalorie...but since Americans are challenged by the metric system they do not notice that they constantly make an error by a factor of 1000. And kilocalorie is way more accurate than British Thermal Unit. I bet we can squeeze a footpound in there somehow to make it totally unusable. Energy content is measure in kilojoule these days anyway...and yes, units are never pluralized.
the calorie is a gross rule of thumb at best. it doesn't account for any cycles in the body, insulin/leptin responses, digestion/processing time, how a person feels, or many other important factors. sure it's correct when you compare 300 vs 5000 calories in one day, but saying (almost) every adult should eat eg 2000 calories a day, every day, is a horrible disservice. our lifestyle (busyness, stress/anxiety, overscheduled eating, hurried/scant social connection) is more of a factor in obesity and disease than our number of calories.
> If a candy bar indicates 400 calories, you may actually get 700 calories
You can't absorb more than it contains, what sort of twisted logic makes you think that's possible??
Martin: "Dickety"? Highly dubious!”
Abe Simpson: “What're you cackling at, fatty? Too much pie, that's your problem!”
Joey LaMotta: “Just get down to 155 pounds, you fat bastard. Just stop eatin’! What’s the problem? Stop eatin’, that’s all. You can do it.”
Penn: “This is our piano player, Jonesy. He used to be quite fat, 90 pounds fatter. He developed his own, special, one-step program. It’s like the 12-step with some minor adjustments, and it can work for just about anything. Jonesy, tell ‘em about it.”
Jonesy: “Just stop fuckin’ eating so much.”
Well let's say there's some degree of error between the calorie in general and the calorie for you. I would think that, it's some multiplier, and that, you should be able to adjust it by monitoring your diet and the consistency with what you eat. Like, if you gain 1 lb a week, and eat 10000 calories during that time, then regardless of what the measure is, you need to either adjust your intake down, or increase your burn rate, or both. I hate to be barbaric about it, but you never see fat people in gulags and concentration camps. Sooner or later, calories DO matter.
This is my sig.
Not all calories are created equal but counting calories assumes this. Counting calories 1 for 1 assumes that 1 calorie from a donut is the same as 1 calorie from a carrot. Clearly calories from different foods perform differently in the body.
To take that point a step further, counting calories turns a blind eye to the fact that 2 of the same food item can have very different nutrient profiles. In other words, calories from the beef of a humanely raised cow allowed to eat grass are ultimately different than those from a cow that never saw grass in its life and was pumped with antibiotics/corn/grain. The calories may add up the same but what happens in the body when the calories are consumed isn’t the same. Counting calories doesn’t account for this.
Are the scientists accounting for the fact that not all calories are burned equally? Burning sugar for energy results in more CO2 byproduct than burning fat for fuel does. Failure to take this into consideration ignores the fact that more CO2 leftovers means more acid at the cellular level. This means that sugar calories are a less efficient/effective fuel source when compared to fat calories.
Tim DiFrancesco,
Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, Los Angeles Lakers
www.tdathletesedge.com
@tdathletesedge